It’s proprietary, after all. I understand paid is fine, but even then, it usually better be open source.
So, why is Unraid an exception ?
Thanks
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Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you’re doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.
The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.
UnRAID is also great when you know exactly what you’re doing but you do this stuff for work every day and your home stuff you want to be easy and out of the box lol.
Same, I’m a Linux user since redhat 5 and more than capable of running all the unraid features on a regular Linux distro or proxmox, truenas, whatever … I just don’t want to, I want flexible disk sizes and a bunch of docker containers, that’s it. Unraid offers that in a great package.
If I’ve learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it’s that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.
But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.
I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.
Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.
There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.
Considering the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex: this is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.
There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.
I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.
Has a nice UI, let’s me mix and match disks, let’s me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.
All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.
I don’t know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.
Mixing disks is the #1 reason I went with unraid over any other option.
Zfs and truenas core do this fine
Please elaborate. I have only found that all drives will be treated as they would have the smallest capacity in the bunch.
There is some manual workarounds, which is would not call „can do it fine“
Or am I missing something?
